Florida poll shows Trump leading Rubio by 6, but lead is likely bigger

A new major poll of likely Florida Republican voters shows Donald Trump leads Marco Rubio by 6 percentage points, but even the group that conducted the survey cautions that the frontrunner is probably ahead by even more in the senator’s home state.

That’s because Trump has helped change the election game in Florida for this presidential primary by inspiring unlikely voters to become likely voters.

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“This is an electorate of unlikelies — I’m calling them surge voters. I’m watching them every day. They’re not dropping off. They’re surging to the polls,” said Ryan Tyson, director of political operations at Associated Industries of Florida, which conducted the survey of 631 likely Republican voters. That survey showed Trump leading Rubio 33-27 percent, with Ted Cruz at 16 percent and John Kasich at 12.

But in conducting the survey and observing similar ones and early voting return data, Tyson noticed two problems.

First, he analyzed the 772,000 Republicans who have already voted early and found that 17 percent — or 132,000 — had not voted in the last two major elections. Those voters aren’t considered likely voters. So they get missed in so-called “voter-list polls,” in which calls are made based on voter lists. In these polls, such as the ones AIF and other pollsters prefer in Florida, respondents are pre-screened to make sure they’ve voted in past elections and are properly registered to vote in their party primary.

Second, Tyson found that polls using a different method of surveying — simply asking people to self-identify their party registration and their likelihood of voting — showed Trump leading Rubio with far higher margins, 20 percentage points or more.

The problem with those so-called “self-ID polls” is that they can capture non-Republicans, who are barred from voting in Florida’s closed GOP primary.

On Wednesday, Quinnipiac University released one of those types of surveys. It showed Trump leading Rubio 45-22 percent. A CNN poll showed Trump with a 16 percentage-point lead.

One voter-file survey, however, appeared to mirror the self-ID polls. Conducted for FOX News, the poll released Wednesday evening showed Trump far ahead of Rubio, 43-20 percent.

So who’s right? Perhaps nobody — or perhaps everybody if all the polls are averaged together. Doing that gives Trump a lead of more than 10 percentage points, depending on which polls are used.

“We all could probably do a better job,” said Tyson, who wouldn’t hazard a guess about what Trump’s actual lead is.

Regardless of the poll, however, they’ve all been in agreement since August about one general data point: Trump has been leading the pack as the undisputed frontrunner in Florida. Rubio’s numbers have been steadily improving, at least until recently.

The AIF poll, conducted with Tel Opinion Research, showed that Rubio’s net favorability has declined 24 percentage points since late February. His net favorability rating is still positive, at 24 percent, with 58 percent of Republicans polled viewing him favorably while only 34 percent see him favorably. But now Cruz has a higher net favorability rating, of 27 percent – a 7-point increase in less than three weeks.

Since that late February survey, Ben Carson dropped out of the race. The big beneficiary: Kasich, who gained 7 percentage points in the overall competition. Rubio’s numbers remained the same. Trump’s and Cruz’s declined a percentage point, which is a negligible shift that’s well within the survey’s 4 percentage point margin of error.

Rubio’s allies have been spreading the word that Rubio is down by as few as 5 percentage points and that he can make up the difference. But that looks unlikely if voters keep appearing to break Trump’s way as he wins more elections in other states while Rubio continues to lose them, as he did Tuesday. Florida’s winner-take-all primary, where 99 delegates are at stake, is March 15.

“I think there are a lot more Trump voters out there than many polls show,” said University of Florida political science professor Daniel A. Smith, who first pointed out publicly the number of unlikely voters casting early ballots.

“These are people who didn’t vote in the last two general elections. And there are more than 130,000 of them, and they’re growing every day,” Smith said. “We are talking people wrestled from their sleep and coming out in a presidential primary. There is something going on. And I think it’s a loud slap against the Republican establishment.”